How to Make Business Cards from Beer Boxes

Beer fans tend to drink a lot of different beers, and after a while they end up with a colorful stack of beer boxes and six-pack carriers. It’s too bad that these functional pieces of artwork and illustrations are destined for the landfill or at best the recycling facility.

An alternative to dumping them is to reuse the cardboard for other purposes. Here’s how to turn your recycling bin into a pile of unique up-cycled business cards.

Materials

Old beer boxes

Ruler

X-acto knife /Scissors

RISO Print Gocco kit ($180 – $240 on eBay or Amazon)

RISO Print Gocco Ink

Step 1: Select your design and print it out in black and white.

Whatever is black will be where the ink will show.

You can fit 3 card images per screen so you don’t have to do one at a time.

Adding crop marks will make cutting them out a lot easier

Step 2: Create your screen

Line up your graphic on the screen

Load screen into Print Gocco

Load flash bulbs into exposing box

Press down hard causing the bulbs to flash and expose your screen

Your design will stick to the screen when done (do not remove the paper yet)

Step 3: Cut your desired beer boxes for print

You can use whatever boxes you want as long as they are flat and bigger than your screen.

We have been using beer flats and 30pk wrappers for years as ‘complimentary windshield covers’ for our customers when wintry weather is forecast in our area. I had a curved rubber stamp made that says:
Place under wiper blade
Compliments of
NEIGHBORHOOD WINE & SPIRITS
North Little Rock
(501) 791-2626
REMOVE BEFORE DRIVING
We roll the stamp on the unprinted side of the beer flat or 30pk wrapper and keep a stack of them next to our drive-up window and put a sign outside that says: Don’t scrape that snow & ice…ask for your complimentary windshield cover! When somone asks for one we ask for their preference, Corona, Budweiser, Busch, Coors Light, Heineken, etc. and hand it out the window. It helps us get rid of the cardboard and we find out which of our customers have a good sense of humor and which are real grouches. At the end of a bad day some folks get a good laugh out of it, and it saves them from scraping ice & snow the next morning.

For years we have been cutting square coasters out of the stout, thick cardboard sheets that ship on the top of our new, empty beer bottles. Once we get a stack of square 4″x4″ coasters cut, we stamp them with our brewery’s logo. They look great, are very functional, and they’re craft!